A recruiter thinks Goldman Sachs and BofA will double UK hiring this year
Bank hiring might not be on its way back to the same extent that revenue is, but that doesn’t mean that some banks aren’t firing the hiring machine back up.
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Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, for instance. Recruitment firm Morgan McKinley, working with market intelligence firm Vacancysoft, estimates that the two American banks will have 935 open vacancies between them in the UK at the end of the year, a near doubling from the 470 they had, combined, in 2023.
The single biggest number of openings is predicted to be at JPMorgan, which is expected to have over 2,700 vacancies in the UK at the end of 2024, an 8% increase on last year. JPMorgan is expected to hire even more people than the vast UK-based commercial banks; Nationwide, Barclays, and NatWest are all expected to halve the number of vacancies they had in the UK by the end of the year.
Retail banks need fewer people as they close branches and move online. Just 40% of the retail banking footprint from 2015 still operational, according to the Guardian. Even so, the demand for IT development and engineering talent across the UK banking industry is faltering. As the chart below shows, Morgan McKinley and VacancySoft expect it to be flat in 2024 vs. 2023.
Technology jobs may not be thriving, but they're still eliminating humans in other areas of the banking industry. Morgan McKinley blames its estimated 20% decline in banking compliance and risk roles since 2022 on “the AI-driven automation of risk analysis by many banks,” as well as the use of blockchain to record foreign exchange transactions.
Nonetheless, while vacancies for 2024 are expected to be up on 2023, they’re well behind 2022, even discarding retail banks. JPMorgan, for instance, is predicted to have only around 51% of the vacancies by the end of this year that it had in 2022; at Bank of America, the number is 23%. Goldman is an exception, seemingly on account of its brand-new office in Birmingham.
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